Legends of the Fall

by Jim Harrison

  Seven hours later he was sitting in a chair in the new room reading Audubon magazine. He had read hastily through the entirety of E.M. Cioran’s A Short History of Decay, a book Phillip had left behind for him. Cioran immediately became Nordstrom’s favorite author and he meant to scour the city for additional books. He had spread his weapons around the room; the razor on a windowsill beneath a wide-open window, Sarah’s gun still wrapped in a handkerchief—the prints might prove useful—and before him on the desk a bottle of wine wrapped in a wet hand-towel to use as a sap. He was mindful of the total absurdity of what he was doing. It was impossible not to smile despite the apparent danger but then he figured he might own some modest sort of amateur’s advantage: his concentration was complete because he had either lost or given up everything on earth. He went through the unlocked double door and made a pass beside the street window and turned off the light. Now if anyone were watching the window they might assume he was going to bed. He had placed a number of empty beer cans around on the floor with spoons stuck in them as a childish early warning system. He picked up his diary, went through the bedroom and into the new room, leaving the inner door ajar. He doubted if any interloper could resist the bait of the new room. He refused the urge to have a drink.

  June 18, 78: The girls with Phillip took off for Europe at noon today. I am sitting here waiting for Slats’ man, probably the Italian, to show up and threaten me further—probably a mild beating for the insolence of my reply to the extortion. What a surprise he’ll have assuming I’m successful. Will check out cooking schools tomorrow, also Cioran books. Like those sections titled “The Arrogance of Prayer,” “Crimes of Courage and Fear,” “The Mockery of a ‘New Life,’” “Non-Resistance to Night” and “Turning a Cold Shoulder to Time.” Despite the fact that Phillip is an utter asshole I must send him a thank you note. Wish I had some fried bluegills. A drink. A pretty woman. Wonder what Cioran does everyday writing out of that abysm of despair. Presumptuous to write and ask though I suspect he’s reasonably happy having gotten it out of his system as they say. I am not a violent person and I’m not interested in violence. The media romanticizes this nonsense constantly. Never read anything about anyone I knew that was accurate. The world is haphazard. You can see the strain of resisting this principle if you study faces at all. My first warning should be the elevator cable unless he comes up the stairs. But that door is locked on the inside. Locks are useless except against the most slovenly criminals. Wish I had that huge Bouvier that got hit by a car down at the beach. Terrible to keep a dog like that in the city. Sephard talked about a Spanish restaurant that makes first-rate stewed squid. Maybe tomorrow night. Forgot I had all that dough until I paid the bill at Melon’s and felt lump. Sarah owns one of those truly beautifully formed pussys. A marvel of wise design amen. Remembered I could call my oId friend high up in D.E.A. and have Slats rousted. But I oddly hate to see anyone locked up. And it’s best to learn how to do things on your own in this new life I have so studiously chosen. Midnight now.

  Nordstrom got up from the desk and stared in a slow half-circle at the locations of his weaponry. Dressed in his pajama bottoms he did a little jig and shuffle in front of the mirror before turning out the light. If things went well he would get a room or a small sublet apartment and a radio so he could begin dancing again. He had prepaid for the suite for a full week: over two hundred dollars a day-thinking he might need to entertain—but now he knew he must economize. He began to force everything from his mind so that sitting there he could dwell entirely within his ears. He had purposefully left his watch in the bedroom —such things moved on a different time and a watch was a pointless distraction.

  It was interesting for him to note that in the darkness, barring thought, pictures still floated lazily across his mind. He discovered that if he didn’t fix on these mental images, no matter how fascinating they were, they would disappear. They came from left to right: Sonia on the bassinet, thunderstorm on the lake with a crane flying across the metal plate of water, Mother picking wild strawberries, a wreck on the San Diego Freeway, dancing in Brookline, asparagus in Marblehead, a distracting woman he had never seen in life. Now his eyes fixed on a cuticle of light peeping above the next building. It became the moon, nearly full and its flowering nimbus showed him the room and his feet on the floor. A beer can tipped with its spoon. He rose and flattened his bare back next to the doorjamb. The future came at five breaths a minute and his heart seemed too high in his ribs. There was a small itching now inside just below his pajama drawstring. Then the door opened and the man made three slow steps in, paused half turning, and made three more. Using the wall for a fulcrum Nordstrom bolted through the room catching the man low in the back; two long heavy steps and he bore him quickly to and out the window before the man even began to struggle, and catching only the window jamb with an effort to save himself. In the first few stories of his plummet the man was silent, then a scream began that diminished in distance until his body struck the trash cans. Nordstrom had the odd thought that it was like casting out a huge anchor in a very deep place where for some strange reason there was no water. He dropped Sarah’s pistol out the window, then wiped his sweating face with the handkerchief. The moon shone clear and sweet on his face and chest. Visitors often forgot the moon shone down on New York City.

  In the morning he had just gotten out of the shower and was having his coffee and talking to his mother when the detectives came. He let them in and quickly finished the conversation; she was planning on a trip to Hawaii with her cousin Ida in November. They hoped to see Jack Lord work on Hawaii Five-O. One detective accepted a cup of coffee while the other looked out the window. They were both very bored. No, Nordstrom hadn’t heard anything. Sound asleep. Too much celebrating. His daughter had graduated eighth in her class at Sarah Lawrence. Why the extra room? He thought his ex-wife and daughter might stay an extra day. He went to the window and looked down with them. O what a shame. Some poor soul. A suicide. Perhaps but not a hotel guest or model citizen. A thug in fact and they were trying to figure out what he was doing in the neighborhood. It was a hot morning and Nordstrom offered them a beer but they refused politely. They had a lot of floors to cover. Thank you.

  The detectives were barely out of the room when Sarah answered the call he had made to Slats before he went to bed the night before. Nordstrom was very grave. The prisoner had made a full confession before, out of grief, he flung himself out the window. Maybe he hadn’t counted the floors on the elevator. Who knows. He insisted she and Slats join him for lunch at the Japanese restaurant at the Waldorf. Then they could settle up. Then Nordstrom arranged to have dinner with the Sephard, thinking he might have some good tips on a cooking school.

  To tell the truth he had mixed feelings about what he had done but there seemed no alternative. These criminals might have finally threatened his family. And he had been prepared in his soul if the night had gone otherwise. But it was no small thing to hurl another creature into eternity. Only rarely did a man occur on earth bad enough to die. He dressed and combed the bookstores in the area looking with some success for books by E.M. Cioran, finding them finally at the newly opened Books and Company near the Whitney.

  When he arrived at the Waldorf Sarah and Slats were already seated, having no doubt arrived early to case the joint. Nordstrom had barely been seated by a brightly painted geisha when an old, florid colleague from the oil industry stopped at the table. Nordstrom introduced his table mates but the conversation faded dismally when he admitted readily that he was doing nothing but thinking about going to cooking school. Slats was elegant in a blue cord Haspel summer suit. The oil man left and drinks arrived.

  “Now you’re a murderer,” Slats tisked knowingly and Sarah nodded in agreement.

  “Righto,” Nordstrom said with a weird musical lilt. He meant to make them uncomfortable. “Right now under this table cloth I got a .44 aimed at your balls and I’m thinking of blowing your ass off in self-defense.” Slats’ eyes widened in a
larm and disbelief. Nordstrom winked crazily at Sarah and yelled “bang.” Heads turned in alarm and Slats tipped over his drink. A geisha rushed over. “I was just telling a joke that ended with ‘bang,’” Nordstrom explained to the room at large. “I want three sashimis and one large squid tempura. And get the man another drink.” The geisha bowed.

  “You are a fucking lunatic,” Slats insisted.

  “Righto. I wanted your complete attention.”

  “Oh, man, you are in real trouble,” Slats nodded.

  “Yes, you are . . .” Sarah began to chime in but noted Nordstrom’s crazed stare and paused. He stared at both of them with his head strangely atilt.

  “You both have to cut this jive shit or I’m going to tear out somebody’s heart. There’s only so much shit I can take, you know? You sent that numb-nuts wop to my room and I proved he couldn’t fly, not even a little bit. Now I got this confession . . .”

  “This man would never talk,” Slats interrupted, for the first time fully getting into what was happening at the table.

  “That’s how much you know, fuckface.” Nordstrom was enjoying the purity of his acting performance, unexampled until now in his life. “I interrogated for Special Forces in Da Nang in sixty-seven. Sometimes we pitched them out of Hueys, and sometimes I strangled them. They had thin necks.” Nordstrom made a strangling motion with his hands. “Your friend was a hard case. I sapped him and when he woke he wouldn’t be nice so I knotted a wet towel and got it in his mouth so he wouldn’t bite. Then I put four fingers in and jerked up and got the front teeth. The confession with a gold tooth is in a safety deposit box at Chase Manhattan.” Nordstrom remembered the gold tooth from the restaurant. “Then I pitched the cocksucker out the window. And then I called you and went to bed.”

  The sashimi arrived and Nordstrom advised that they use the horseradish mustard sparingly. Slats gazed at him feeling a bit trapped. It had been a little stupid all along and the angles were disappearing. “This is raw fish isn’t it?” Nordstrom nodded. Slats was tentative, and then, liking the fish, he began to eat quickly.

  “Maybe it’s a draw. Shit, Berto had a grand of mine on him. Some detective is at the track today with my money. You need any toot?”

  Slats signaled to the waitress and pointed at his place. “More,” he said.

  “No thanks. I don’t think so. Or maybe I could buy some for a friend.” The tempura arrived and Nordstrom served.

  “Here I am gobbling this shit and my dad died on Iwo lima,” Slats laughed. “For you it’s five hundred bucks for a quarter. I can see this detective feeding his old lady lobster on my money.”

  “I’m actually sorry I hit you. I don’t usually think that fast but I had some coke in the toilet and I forgot you were married.”

  Sarah explained it was only a way of making money, a gig, and that they weren’t married. Rich men sympathized with her mistreatment and advanced her money to get out of Slats’ clutches. With Nordstrom they decided to escalate because they were convinced he was simpleminded. Slats was curious about the itinerary of the trip he had forgotten. The idea of foreign travel suddenly reminded Nordstrom of the pictures of vigorous men shearing sheep in the National Geographic in faraway places. They talked on for another half hour and Sarah suggested a cooking school on Waverly Place for when he returned. Slats insisted on paying for the meal. Nordstrom counted out fifteen hundred bucks from Sonia’s BMW money on his lap. Sarah slid him a small sack of coke under the table.

  “I added the grand for what you lost on Berto. I wanted us to be even up. Now everyone is even except Berto.”

  They walked out of the restaurant into a hall off the Waldorf lobby. Slats patted Nordstrom on the shoulder. “Don’t sweat it. He was an asshole.”

  * * *

  At midnight Nordstrom was sitting in the dark in his hotel bedroom looking at the moon and thinking about lily pads. Sonia had insisted he go to the Museum of Modern Art to see these huge paintings of lily pads by Monet and he had gone after lunch, staring at them utterly blankminded for an hour. Now in the moonlight all of the lily pads on the lakes of northern Wisconsin revolved before him. Sometimes they had small buttery-yellow flowers and sometimes they had large white flowers, strong with an eerie perfume he could smell twenty-five years later in a hotel room. He didn’t know if in the morning he would leave on his trip or go to Wisconsin for a few weeks. Bass hid under the lily pads and he used to swim under them and look upward so that the pads looked like small green islands in the air refracting the light. He had given the cocaine to the Sephard over dinner. The Sephard had been relieved but puzzled when Nordstrom insisted that Slats and Sarah were “nice people.” There was a neurotic English girl with a perfect fanny with the Sephard. She wanted to call a friend for Nordstrom but he said no. He was really quite tired. Just breathing on the bed in the moonlight seemed quite enough for the moment. First you breathed in, then out, and so on. It was easy if you tried to keep calm.

  EPILOGUE

  He drove south in late October, one year after his father’s death, in a sixty-seven Plymouth he had paid seven hundred dollars for. In no particular hurry and nothing to guide him but a Rand McNally, he stopped in Savannah, bought two new tires, and thought the town rather too pretty for his taste. He wanted to avoid a self-conscious location. In the trunk there was one suitcase, one box of books, and one box of assorted cooking equipment he could not bear to part with in his urge to travel light; he was neither happy nor unhappy as he rejected one place after another, just looking things over. Finally, in late November, he got a job in a small seafood restaurant in Islamorada, Florida, of good reputation at an abysmal wage. His fingers were soon sore from cleaning shrimp and picking crab. He got nailed rather painfully in the palm by a stone crab and learned to be careful. Within a month he was allowed to cook a daily specialty. His home was a one-room tourist cabin at the end of a lane of crushed shells lined by dank mangroves bordered by an unnavigable lagoon. There was a small gas stove, a double bed, Formica table, linoleum floor, black leopard lamp, rickety air conditioner, three rattan chairs. There were a lot of mosquitoes which he didn’t mind, having been trained for them in Wisconsin. He kept his money in an upturned frozen orange juice can in the refrigerator freezer, not wanting to bother with the bank. He didn’t kill the palmetto bugs that crawled around, having figured that they didn’t eat much or sting. One day he was pleased to see a large rattler back in the bedraggled palm scrub. He bought a rowboat and nearly died when an oarlock broke and he was swept out to sea in a strong tide and a heavy sea and spent an entire day bailing with his hat and paddling with one oar. He was rescued by fishermen and spent two days in a hospital being treated for severe sunburn, feeling like a stupid shit. It paid to keep on your toes, he thought, in this new life where he was utterly unprotected. He unfolded a lot of ice-cold money and bought a Boston Whaler and a sixty-horse Evinrude, after determining it was the most stable boat available. With the help of a push pole he kept strapped to the boat’s gunwale he could skid it across the lagoon in a medium tide and keep it beside the cabin. He bought a spinning rod and some jigs, mask and flippers and a book on marine biology. He waded tidal flats looking at the bottom, fished channels, identified his catch in the book and released it. He worked six days a week but had mornings and Monday off for his explorations. When he felt more comfortable in these strange waters he bought charts and a boat trailer and went off to Big Pine on Mondays, an area richer in mangrove islets and tidal cuts. One warm still day in a deep tidal creek he hooked a tarpon and was shocked as it hurtled out of the water near the boat, twisting its big silver body and its gill plates rattling before it broke off. That day he thought he counted a thousand shades of turquoise in the water. He had become a water, wind and cloud watcher in addition to being a cook. Late at night he danced to a transistor radio. He was the source of respectful local amusement. He had a wonderful affair with a Cuban waitress his own age. She had a small portable stereo and taught him Latin dances. He got more loca
l respect when he threw two burly drunks out of the restaurant one night, punching one senseless, but it reminded him unpleasantly of Berto and he wept a few minutes when he got home. He wrote and received chatty letters from his daughter in Florence, exchanging apercus with Phillip on the great author E.M. Cioran. After the Cuban waitress abandoned Islamorada for Miami he had a brief three-day fling with a college girl who was a bit sullen and really didn’t like to fuck. His mother wrote that she had actually seen Jack Lord in Honolulu. She and Henry planned a two-week trip down in April when the tourist season slackened and Nordstrom would have more time. They would have to take the bus as Henry considered planes an insult to his life and the life of the sky. One day while driving Nordstrom saw a moray eel and a black-tipped shark and was thrilled to the core.

  One evening while he was taking a cigarette break behind the restaurant, Nordstrom watched two waitresses approach, then pause while they whispered. It was his habit during the evening break to sit on a huge piece of dredged coral, hundreds of pounds of tiny antique, crushed marine invertebrates. He would drink a tall, cold piña colada, smoke a cigarette and watch the ocean. In his position of chef none of the other help usurped his sitting place. Now the waitresses came up to him, both a little plump and giggling but one with fine olive features. They offered a joint and he took a long, noncommittal puff. Their problem was that there was a dance tonight in a bar just down Route 1 and they had no one to go with and they didn’t want to walk in the bar alone. Nordstrom was disturbed. He had never danced in public. Oh Jesus why not, he said to himself. At the bar he danced with the two girls and anyone else willing until four in the morning when the band stopped. Then he danced alone to the jukebox until four thirty in the morning when everyone had to leave.